I am 50% done with my MCDBA certification. My aim is to then become a Microsoft Certified Trainer (I am one of the few people that actually really really likes speaking in front of groups of people!).
This change, for me, will be quite a dramatic since I will basically be a contractor and not a permanent employee with a company and the lack of a steady paycheck is something I need to get used to.
I haven’t had much luck in contacting my previous trainers so I’m trying to think of all (or most of) the problems I could run into.
Basically a trainer is a person that contracts out his services to several technical schools. Based on that, here are the ones I could think of:
There will be absolutely no demand for technical trainers
There will be a lag before my first teaching gig since I have no formal teaching experience
After invoicing a school, I may not get paid
After invoicing a school, I will get paid maybe 90 days after the schoole receives the invoice
I will probably have to travel to the schools
I will have to keep learning to teach new technologies (not that it’s a bad thing)
Can anyone else think of any more job related negatives?
I have done IT training as just part of my job for several companies you have probably heard of. I don’t know if my experience was warped just coming from some teaching at very prestigious colleges, but corporate adults can be unbelieveably dumb and apathetic. Tons of people don’t know really basic stuff like right-clicking. You will find that many people have learned computers by rote memorization and believing that computing is done by doing specific things in a specific order. The concepts and reasons remain a mystery to them.
You will probably find that you will really have to dumb-down your classes for many groups of people and you often can’t assume knowledge of even many English words. I worked for a shoe manufacturing company a few years ago and I had to fly to their call center in the midwest to do training for one week a month. The classes were pre-scripted and the first one covered how to turn a computer on as well as the keys on the keyboard and the mouse. That was a 4 hour class and these went on for months.
I love teaching in general but corporate teaching can be a real bitch. People piss and moan about being away from their job and many people just hate the school type setting. That isn’t to say it won’t be rewarding. You will just need to develop a real feel for your students because people at all levels can get very strange when they are put in the student position again.
Been doing this for a long time (computer consulting, though not IT training). There are a lot of positives, but here are some other negative possibilities to consider:
Medical insurance will be inferior to the corporate product, expensive, and hard to get.
You’re gonna have to deal with cancelled flights, missed connections, late flights and going into your assignment with little or no sleep on occasion.
You’re gonna be continually finding your way around strange cities. You won’t be in any of them long enough to really find your way around.
You’re going to have to be absolutely anal about keeping track of your business expenses. Throwing all your receipts into a shoebox will likely not work for you.
Your tax returns will likely get a lot more complicated.